yrieithydd

So back in December I was invited to preach at On Fire Mission Conference. I ummed and aahed for quite a while before accepting - partly who am I to be doing this but also practical questions around my role as Conference Sacristan which takes a fair amount of my time during the conference and I knew that I would have to finish the sermon once I was there because that's how my brain works, and there is something about bringing things in from the conference itself, but once I had a plan for that I agreed. I managed about half the sermon before I arrived, and at least I was able to use my laptop and get the script printed at the conference centre which was easier than Greenbelt's convoluted script. Text below is the printed text. It varied on delivery - but I can't remember how exactly and didn't record it myself.

May I speak in the name of the living God who is Source of All Being, Eternal Word and Holy Spirit.

Who do you identify with in the Gospel reading? The paralysed person, lying down, dependent on others? The friends, desperate to get their friend close to the healer? The scribes, pharisees or teachers of the law – intrigued to hear this teacher that they have gathered from a wide area, but scandalised by the forgiveness of sins? Someone in the crowd? Jesus himself?

This is a story I’ve known and long time and heard many times. I had it in a “Little Fish” book as a small child. I’ve always assumed Jesus is in a house – I think that’s what it said in the story as retold for children and what was in the pictures and it’s what it says in the “The Bible and Disability: A Commentary”. But re-reading it carefully, the type of building is never actually mentioned. I’d always imagined quite a small building, but as I tried to imagine the scene, I realised it may well have been quite large. Maybe a house of an important/wealthy person with a large atrium that could host public events, or maybe a building built for gathering people.

The nearest thing I’ve experienced to this is talks at Greenbelt when there are more listening than can fit in the tent. Some of the venues expect this and have removable sides and loudspeakers on the outside to help people hear, but I remember one year when they had the “red tent” and a talk about life drawings of GB volunteers, it was a very deliberate decision to limit it to those who could fit in the quite small tent, but quite a lot of us decided to listen anyway even if we couldn’t see. One difference though is Greenbelt is quite strict about keeping walkways through the tent for evacuation – not so much for fire but if someone were taken ill. But it gives me a sense of a crowd straining to hear a preacher and a group needing to take unusual measures to get close - untying the side of a tent in that situation – but here going even further – up to the roof and taking off the tiles.

I’ve always imagined 4 friends carrying the bed – one for each corner. Were they expecting to have to do this such that they had come prepared with ropes? Or did they borrow them? (From where/whom?)

This is definitely not an approach to disability access of which the Diocesan Advisory Committee or Cathedral Fabric Advisory Committee would approve! Ripping up tiles and lowering a stretcher to the floor? No fill in this form, raise lots of money and then maybe “no – heritage is more important!” Luke does not record the response of the building owner.

So they’ve got their friend to Jesus. And Jesus sees their faith. It’s not clear whether “their” is specifically the friends and not the paralysed man, or whether it is the faith of the whole group. – is that the faith of the friends or the faith of all of them including the paralysed man? But in our highly individualistic society, I am struck by that plural – corporate faith benefitting an individual.

Jesus responds to that faith by pronouncing:

“Friend your sins are forgiven you”

Then when the scribes and religious leaders mutter about this being blasphemy, he asks them which is easier forgiving sins, or saying get up and walk. And then commands him to take up his bed and walk…

Is this implying a link between sin and paralysis/forgiveness and healing? Or is the physical healing a separate act to demonstrate that Jesus has authority to forgive sins?

David F. Watson in The Bible and Disability: A commentary considers this question, suggesting linking them is a problematic reading. For a start, why the man did not immediately get up if the forgiveness led directly to the healing? He quotes John Nolland who suggests Jesus is implying:

“You are scandalized at this act of mine which is not subject to public verification. What will you make of this other which is plain for all the world to see?”

Then David F. Watson continues:

One could, in fact, read this passage to suggest that Jesus sees in this man more than the man’s physical impairment. Rather, Jesus attends to his state of righteousness before doing anything else, and then he tends to the man’s physical and social wellbeing.

Fr Jarel in his workshop yesterday talked about the miracles he has seen in the confessional, of transformation through telling the truth and receiving God’s forgiveness. Here there is no record of confession, but that liberation of forgiveness is given.

Seeing the paralysed man as more than just his physical impairment resonates with what Mother Kate shared this morning about people assuming that she needs healing because she walks with a stick and with the title of Amy Kenny’s book “My body is not a prayer request” - a book which calls for :

the church to start treating disabled people as full members of the body of Christ who have much more to offer than a miraculous cure narrative and to learn from their embodied experiences.

I was reminded while listening to the debate at the Church in Wales Governing Body about accessibility, that there is a charity which draws inspiration from this story “Through the Roof” and which calls those who champion Disability inclusion (and justice) as roofbreakers. Is this an area for which we are being equipped and sent? What can we as individuals and a community learn from the faith of the friends who don’t take “no” (as said by a crowd blocking the path) for an answer but find a way to overcome the barrier in the moment? It may take longer to go through the necessary processes, but can we centre those with lived experience of disability and together confront the barriers and then dismantle them?

A few weeks ago, I was guiding a fellow Franciscan Tertiary from Nottingham train station to the church where our Area Meeting was happening, and I was struck by the way in which café furniture and signage created something of a slalom effect on the pavements which would not have bothered me without him there.

So in these public acts of forgiveness and healing, Jesus has scandalised the religious leaders of his day. They do not see the person who has been freed of their sin and enabled to live independently, but focus on the apparent blasphemy of declaring sins forgiven. They do not make the leap from their sense of only God can forgive sins, to this healing demonstrates Jesus’ authority to do that – an authority from God. Is that what Luke is encouraging us to take from this?

Peter’s sermon in Acts takes up this theme

Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know — this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law.

But that is not the end of the story: death cannot hold him. This is the foundational event of the early church. The religious and secular (outside the law) powers had combined to have Jesus tried and executed. They thought they’d dealt with him.

But…

He is risen indeed!

I asked to begin with who you identified with in the Gospel – and included the scribes and religious leaders in that. And I ask it again here. Sadly in history as Christians have used passages like this against contemporary Jewish people, fostering anti-semitism as seeing them as those who killed God’s anointed one, rather than hearing them as a warning of a danger inherent to religious traditions – of missing the disturbing work of the Spirit because we think we have the answers pinned down.

Here Peter is talking to a crowd of Israelites, not specifically the scribes and religious leaders that had questioned Jesus in the Gospel, but some may well have been there in that crowd. How do we hear his challenge about repenting, being baptised and his exhortation: ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation’?

This language can be difficult for some of us because it has been weaponised against queer Christians – with sin being seen primarily in sexual terms and in deviating from a binary gender, heterosexual norm, and thus used to control and to limit our flourishing as the diverse children of God – but reading the news shows me plenty of corruption. The abuse of children, of power, people using Christianity to call for genocide and war, exploitation of the planets’ resources and our fellow human beings and our other than human kin.
As with Peter’s first hearers, we need to repent and call others to repentance but also to know as Bishop Timothy Rees put it: